


The Sweet Hereafter

by kvikindi



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: M/M, a number of snails, canonically dead characters, everyone is a ghost, spiritual billiards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-09
Updated: 2014-02-09
Packaged: 2018-01-11 19:09:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1176799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"In the little cobblestoned passage of the Rue Mondétour, under the high awning of a house and a lantern-arm's iron lacework, for some time now a ghost had lived." Or: in which everyone is a ghost, and there are many snails, as well as a certain amount of spiritual progress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sweet Hereafter

In the little cobblestoned passage of the Rue Mondétour, under the high awning of a house and a lantern-arm's iron lacework, for some time now a ghost had lived. He was not the sort of ghost who banged pans to frighten housewives. Horses did not shy away from him; curtains did not flutter, and flowers did not wilt. Little gangs of children pelted screaming down the passage, in pursuit of dogs or buns or whatever delighted children, and took no notice of the Mondétour ghost. One could scarcely say that he haunted, for to so say would imply a certain positive gesture. This ghost did not haunt. He merely existed.

He did not know how long he had been there. For a time there had been violets in the window-boxes, and the windows above them had opened, and he had heard as from far away the sound of a piano, and two voices laughing. Then the violets had gone away. Carts creaked past. Ice formed on barrels like glazing. He might have waited for the violets to come back, had he been convinced that there was a _he_ who could wait, but he was not and so he did not. He was unmarked by self. The stain of humanity had been washed out of him.

* * *

 

That there were other ghosts, he was vaguely conscious. Once a _gamin_ , running along after other _gamins_ , had paused in the passage for a moment. His feet did not quite touch the cobblestones. "They never wait," he said. "Them other boys. They forget all about me. I'll show them. I'll creep up on all of 'em when they're sleeping, and make a horrible face, like _this!_ " He demonstrated, producing a ghastly leer. "That'll make the hair on their heads stand up! Serves 'em right, for forgetting the one what taught 'em all they know."

He was very young. He had a birdlike look.

"Just because a fellow can be invisible don't mean he _is_ invisible," this small philosopher continued. "If you know what I mean. But these kids today! I tell you; they don't respect their elders." He scratched at his ear and shook his head sadly. "They need someone to tell them what's what."

He left, but not before he had cracked the lantern just by jumping at it, and sent a stack of barrels rolling, so that dogs barked and cart-drivers cursed, and an old man in a nightcap stuck his head out the window, shouting, "Have the Austrians come? Are we under attack?"

* * *

 

Once a cart-horse died right in the small street. It was old, just an old nag. Its driver stroked its neck and its mane as it sweated, and soothed it as it breathed its last. But the horse itself, once dead, was whole and radiant. It rose out of its own bones, white and splendid, and ran towards nothingness. It rounded the corner and vanished from sight.

Here, on the dark earth, the driver wept.

* * *

 

Then there was Prouvaire. The ghost knew his name, for he had announced it: just as though he were a person, cheeky as anything. "Hello!" he had said-- very bold, very cheerful. "I'm Jean Prouvaire."

Nor had he been subdued by the ensuing silence. He had blinked, utterly foolish in his velvet waistcoat, with his uncombed hair like autumn leaves, and continued, "I just thought, if we're going to be spending eternity together, we might as well get to know each other. We should not live like strangers. That is against the very heart of community."

There was another silence.

Prouvaire wrinkled his nose, looking very determined.

"Well," he said eventually, "I'll be over at the Corinthe, at any rate. We've figured out how to distill ghost absinthe. I mean, I say 'we,' it was really Grantaire; he is surprisingly ingenious when put to it. If I may candidly say, I much prefer him as a ghost. In fact I think he prefers himself so. It was also he who devised the rules of Spiritual Billiards, a fine game which we play weekly, and to which you are always welcome, although I should clarify that you must bring your own map of Europe and your own snails."

At the end of this extraordinary monologue, he awaited a response. Awarded none, he frowned rather sulkily. "We do not do anything untoward with the snails," he said. "They are very affectionate creatures, and not at all disturbed by ghosts. We have started something of a colony."

When this, too, failed to produce a response, he retreated to the street's mouth. "Please do come," he called behind him. "If you are worried about the Corinthe, the owners do not mind-- they know us well. As long as you do not rattle the windows too much, and are quite strict with your snails, they will be as charming as you please."

And he melted into the night: a smear of phantom color, all pale skin and copper and green, until he was quite gone and there was only the rattle of omnibuses, rolling past in a far-off street.

* * *

 

He came back, though-- Prouvaire. He was very determined. One had to give him that, at least; though one also had to wish he had forgone his snails, which he brought in his pockets. "They have some immunity to the effects of death," he explained. "Combeferre, that is my friend Combeferre, believes that it may be do to with their production of epiphragm, it being similar to the plasm of the undead spirit. See how I can carry them most easily."

He produced from his ghostly pocket a array of large snails, with shells in unappealing colors: brown, cream, gray. "This is my prize," he announced, pointing to one of the indistinguishable number. "My _arianta arbustorum._ I call it Bête du Gevaudan, for it is most ferocious, but-- do not worry, only when at play. And here, you see--" disentangling a rust-colored creature from the cuff of his sleeve-- "a _helix aspersa_ that I call Robespierre, though Enjolras, when he was here, would try to stop me. You do not know Enjolras; he was a great admirer of Robespierre. For myself, I cannot think how more nobly I could conclude my days than to give my name to such a snail; I can't imagine why he argues. Argued. Oh, and look here, look-- this creamy fellow, this is _helix pomatia_ , and I call him Cornelius Agrippa, because he was brown, and now is gold, and that is the essence of alchemy."

He proceeded to introduce a large number of snails: the Emperor Augustus, Profiterole, l'Austrichienne ("she quarrels with Robespierre"), and one called Pontmercy, though Prouvaire could not quite explain this name's origin. The snails maneuvered themselves across his topcoat, all the while, and he picked them off fondly.

"You should see," he said, "--my friend Bahorel has two which he claims are the Largest Snails in the World, and he calls them Gog and Magog, and two lazier snails you could not imagine. Bahorel constantly proclaims their imminent triumph, but they have never yet won him a game, in reality."

One snail, a small one, very neutral in appearance, had almost made its way to Prouvaire's shoulder. He plucked it off, and set it in the palm of his hand. It waved its antennae. "It's funny," Prouvaire said. "I never thought much of snails, when I was alive. They're the sort of thing you don't think of. Like roads, or tableware, or squirrels. Or certain types of cheese. But now I am dead, I am grateful for their affection. When you are dead you have to cling to people; they don't cling to you. But the snail is an animal that clings."

He tilted his head and waited. A look of displeasure crept across his snub-nosed face, until, once again, he was almost sulking. "I mean to say that you ought to be grateful for my attention," he announced in a loud voice. "I am not a snail, but all the same, it is a picture intended to suggest a sort of analogy."

Then, with an impatient noise, he gathered up his snails and made his exit: dramatically.

* * *

 

A black-haired ghost vomited behind a barrel-cart one night; it left no stain on the cobblestones. He raised watery, tragic eyes to the heavens, and tripped forward to lie peaceably on a narrow doorstep. For a moment, it seemed he might be content there, and might sleep, inasmuch as ghosts slept-- but after a moment, he blinked, and bellowed a halting song whose volume grew louder as it went:

_J'aimons limaçons_   
_et j'aimons limaçons_   
_et-- de-- tous nos bons_   
_oui, j'aimons limaçons_

At this interval, thankfully, he fell off the door-step. He proceeded to snore loudly for half a dozen minutes, before vanishing completely.

The Mondétour ghost experienced a sensation. He could not identify it; nor could he locate it in his body, insofar as he had a body-- for he did not feel he had a body; he did not feel that he had any limits; he did not sense a place where his skin stopped and air began; he was, he thought, as strange and diaphanous as mist-- yet unmistakably it was a feeling, and it was his feeling. He turned it around, inspected it from all angles, tried to investigate it. It might have been laughter. He wondered if, when he was alive, he had been the kind of person who laughed. He suspected not. Something about the idea was foreign. Like seeing another person perform a complicated movement, something you yearned to imitate but could not quite grasp; you struggled to make a similar motion, but always, in some important way, you failed to understand. Others did it. You could not do it. 

And yet this trace of laughter like a grace in him.

* * *

 

Some ghosts came and went, over and over, more like echoes than actual men. There was a blond youth who still bore blood on his coat, a wet patch that turned his back bright red, and a dark-haired boy in a worker's cap who walked with him-- the latter with a self-conscious seriousness that dissolved sometimes in a smile of great brilliance. They paused, three or four times, at the end of the passage, where light split the shadows into white-gold haze, and stand there, speaking quietly, dust drifting through their bodies, till the sun moved, the light left, and they shivered away.

Once Prouvaire came pelting after them, just as they were fading. "Wait!" he called. "Feuilly, tell him to wait!"

But the ghosts did not hear him, or else they could not. They were gone before he reached their sun-touched place. He stood there, resting his hand against the brick wall. His look said that he had lost something, a loss so great it would not fit inside his body. This was a feeling that the Mondétour ghost could imagine. 

At length he coughed. His unused voice hard and brittle, the sound of it scraping like brick on brick: "Why are you unhappy?" the Mondétour ghost asked.

Prouvaire whirled. "Oh, you _would_ pick now to speak! Shut up again; you know nothing about it!"

And in a cyclone of amber hair flying, he hurled himself through the wall, disappearing completely.

* * *

 

But he came back, Prouvaire: early the next morning, looking very sorry. He had tied his hair back with a blue ribbon, and he was carrying some flowers. He stood at the mouth of the street. "Hello?" he said. "Are you there?"

The ghost did not answer.

Prouvaire sighed. "I was unhappy because they were my friends, and they are gone now, and it makes me sad. Look, I have brought you a snail. The flowers are so that he may eat them."

He extended the flowers.

"Why does it make you sad?" the Mondétour ghost asked.

"Because they were my friends. I have told you. Don't you miss your friends?"

"I don't have any friends."

"You must have once."

The ghost thought about this. "No," he said at last. "I do not think that I have liked someone enough to be his friend."

"Surely someone has liked you, though."

"Why would they?"

"I'm sure you were a man of some qualities."

"I can't recall any of them."

"Perhaps you had an endearing frown. Perhaps you played music. Perhaps you thought about politics. Sometimes there is not even a reason why two persons become friends; an affinity develops, like a resonance of notes. Or you build a sort of edifice, a shared structure of encounters together, and it is private, and no one else may enter in."

"No," the ghost said. "No, I don't think so. I have no affinity. I have no resonance. I am not interested in other people."

"That is a great shame." Idly, Prouvaire let the snail drop from a flower and crawl inquisitively up his sleeve. "Do you know, the Orientals think that man has a third eye. I believe that its location is at the front of the head, and it helps one to see, oh, a great number of mystical things. But sometimes I think, maybe it is just a chink in the wall of this prison, that lets us look out-- I mean, of the body. But then other people can look in as well. That never happens in stories. The chink in the wall is always so someone can escape; it is never so someone else can get in. But, oh, well, we are ghosts now, so it must not matter; we are free of earthly cages and infinite."

"You talk a great deal," the ghost said to this.

Prouvaire shrugged expressively. "Not nearly so much as my friend Grantaire. Once he expounded for more than an hour on ladies' riding hats, and the mating habits of tortoises, and the substance of the Platonic ideal. If you play at Spiritual Billiards, you shall meet him. That is why I have brought you a snail, so that you may become accustomed to it, and enter into a harmony of mind."

Having plucked the snail off and replaced it on the flowers, he extended his offering once more.

"I am not interested in Spiritual Billiards," the ghost informed him. But he took the flowers in spite of this. He was, in retrospect, surprised that he could take the flowers-- that he had a hand, apparently attached to a wrist, which was, in turn, attached to the rest of a body. He frowned, and touched his ghostly lips.

Prouvaire beamed. "I will bring more food for the snail. You must try to speak to it. You may give it a name, if you wish; I have not named it."

"Snails have no names."

Undeterred, Prouvaire went on: "They can be nervous creatures, so you may find that it wishes to sleep in your pocket. If you have questions, you may find me at the Corinthe, as you know."

Having delivered this wisdom, he vanished.

The ghost looked at the snail. The snail waggled its antennae. It began placidly to munch upon a leaf.

* * *

 

It was a medium-sized snail. Its shell was brown. It was about the shape that a snail should be.

"You are a snail," the ghost told it. "You do not have a name."

The snail appeared untroubled by this. It did, as Prouvaire had warned, have an affinity for the ghost's pockets. It also enjoyed the collar of his topcoat. It was not disturbed by the shadows of the street.

"You are an _escargot_. You are made to be cooked."

The snail's antennae swayed in indifference. It began a slow journey along one lapel.

"Garlic," the ghost threatened.

* * *

 

At night, in the passage, you could sometimes hear fighting. Rifle-reports, the sounds of dying men. That was a whole range of sounds: the shrieks, but also the moaning, and the weeping, and the various wetnesses. The human body was a sloppy creation. Why had these sounds persisted? Sometimes there was the hollow boom of the cannon, or a voice crying in defiance, " _Vive l'avenir! Vive la France!"_

Ghost-sounds. They disturbed the snail. It sought refuge in his pocket. 

"It is a good thing to be a snail," the ghost said, "and not a man."

* * *

 

Prouvaire began to come by almost daily. He brought herbs instead of flowers. He smelled of them. An herb smell. How could a ghost smell like herbs?

"Here's rosemary," Prouvaire said. "That's for remembrance. Have you given him a name?" He teased the snail with a stick of rosemary. The snail ignored him completely.

"He has no name. He is a snail."

"Pas de Nom, then."

"No. That is not a name. You cannot make that a name. That is not what a name is. Additionally, it is a silly joke."

"Odysseus did it!" Prouvaire said, ever-cheerful. "Or very nearly. I think he looks like a Pas de Nom."

"You are an irritating boy," the ghost said.

* * *

 

Another time: clover and lavender. A more vivid and a sweeter scent.

"I dreamed of bringing the revolution to Provence. That is what I think of, when I smell this. The diligence rattling past those fields, the waves of bees, the strokes of flowers almost painted in, and a smell that never comes out of the earth. That is my home. That's what I think of, when I think of the Republic." Prouvaire looked small and almost translucent. It was raining, and the rain dripped right through him.

"Revolution is violation of natural order. It is the greatest crime that a man can commit. You should be shot; you are a danger."

"I was," Prouvaire said.

It occurred to the ghost, much later that night, that he had known this, though he could not say where the knowledge came from. He felt physically disturbed by it. He could not say if this pertained to the fact of the knowing, or to some specific of the knowledge. He had not thought about how Prouvaire had died. He had simply accepted the fact of his death-- as he accepted the ghosts, as he accepted the small street, as he accepted the passage of clouds overhead. Now that he knew, he did not want to think about it.

"I am sickly," he told the snail. "My humors are out of balance. This is evident, because I have a pain just here, in my chest."

* * *

 

On Prouvaire's next visit, he was sulky and short-tempered. He brought only some mint and nondescript grasses. He sat cross-legged on the cobbles and watched the snail eat them, clearly brooding, his chin in his hands.

"Why are you unhappy," the ghost said flatly.

"You would not understand. It is to do with friends."

"Oh," the ghost said. He did not argue. He decided not to be interested.

"Do you believe in heaven?" Prouvaire asked.

"I don't know." For some reason the question half-panicked him. _I believe in judgement_ , he thought; and then, _I do not believe in judgement_. The two impulses clashed inside his head. He said only, "I can't remember."

"Combeferre has gone there. I mean, I must guess. He's not here anymore. Why are we ghosts, do you suppose?"

The ghost said, truthfully, "I can't imagine."

"I thought it was, you know, a sad death, a young life left unfinished. But we did quite a lot, and our deaths were not sad. Certainly death itself does not prove to be sad; it's like a holiday. But like a holiday, eventually you grow tired and wish to get back."

"I do not believe in holidays," the ghost informed him.

Prouvaire gave him a skeptical look and, unexpectedly, laughed. "Perhaps you have been condemned to one, and that is your judgement." 

The impulse to smile fought strangely with the impulse to frown. The ghost pressed his lips together. He said, "Judgement doesn't work like that."

* * *

 

Sometimes there was simply weeping throughout the street: a sourceless weeping, eerie and transient. The ghost wondered, without knowing why, if it were the weeping of a girl. He pictured her: jut-boned, with big dark eyes. Or perhaps the street itself was weeping. It had seen enough, after all; you could mark in the walls the chips of an unhealing violence. He thought of the horse, its weary death. Surely that was enough to witness-- the everyday suffering in the world.

He had an idea that he had once thought differently to this. Perhaps I too was shot, he thought; perhaps they put a hole in me. When I was alive, I was an impermeable fortress. But now some greater force has penetrated my being. All sorts of strange ideas can wander through, as with a broken window that lets in a draft. 

He tried to envision the scope of these ideas. Perhaps he would come to appreciate music. He might tell amusing lies, or wear a blue cravat. He might become infected with happiness. Happiness, to him, had always seemed excessive, and-- being excessive-- dangerous. To transgress the limit of full satisfaction was to enter on an unending path; to enter into a cloudy realm; to unfix desire from object. What did it mean, "happy?" How did one measure it? How did one map and contain its expanse?

"Happiness is a disorder," he told Pas de Nom. 

The snail chewed thoughtfully through a leaf of grass.

* * *

 

Prouvaire brought his own snails to visit. "I thought they might miss Pas de Nom," he explained. 

The snails displayed very little recognition or interest. They crawled effortfully over some clover. One fell asleep on the knuckles of Prouvaire's hand.

The sun was shining. There were violets in the window. The ghost supposed they had been there for some time; he had not previously noticed them. They matched the violet coat Prouvaire was wearing. In the Rue de la Chanvrerie, a man was whistling, an old song, from the age of Napoleon. A sun-shower fell and dewed the cobbles. The world felt light and clean again.

"I had a name," the ghost said. "I must have."

"Must you? Perhaps you are like the snail," Prouvaire said.

"You appear to believe that you are clever."

"I know that I am the cleverest."

He looked very smug and pleased with himself. Out of impulse, the ghost reached out and flicked him on the head, as one might a misbehaving child. Prouvaire swatted him away and laughed.

"I had, though," the ghost said. "And I don't remember."

Prouvaire picked at a small wet leaf of clover. "Perhaps that is not a bad thing."

* * *

 

The ghost of an old man left footprints through puddles. He was wearing a ragged coat and no hat. He had on his face a beatific expression. Blood trailed behind him and then vanished.

"Monsieur," the Mondétour ghost said, "I beg your pardon. This is my home. Perhaps you could take another path."

* * *

 

Prouvaire appeared, drunk, on an early summer evening. He was carrying an empty bottle in his hand. The air was cool, and the ghost had been listening to the crickets that lived in the crack between the cobblestones and pavement.

"I brought you," Prouvaire said, "I brought you-- a thing." He sat down heavily. "A thing. I don't remember," he confessed.

"Might the thing be something alcoholic?"

"Oh. Yes!" He waved the bottle. "Vapors. We burn and bottle them."

"I am not interested in drunkenness."

"Oh." Prouvaire appeared rather crestfallen. "I suppose I will drink it, then."

"I am sorry to refuse your offer."

"No. That is all right. You are honest."

"Yes," the ghost said. Then all at once he was not sure. "Is an animal honest?"

Prouvaire gave the question serious, albeit drunken, thought. "I think... that you cannot really ask that. It is the wrong kind of question to ask about animals."

"So, then," the ghost said. He felt very depressed. He scowled at Prouvaire.

"Your face is inappropriate," Prouvaire informed him. "You must be sorry for me. It is the anniversary of my death."

"Oh," the ghost said. He felt even worse.

"No; do not be like that. Really it is an occasion of celebration. I was quite satisfied to be dead. Well, not at the moment; I was very frightened. But sort of before and after that. It was what I was aiming for. It was the best thing I could do."

"Do you really think that?" It was not an accusation. He was curious.

"Yes, of course."

"But how can you be certain?"

"Oh... I distrust certainty." Prouvaire held the bottle up and squinted through it: at clouds, or at the moon, or at whatever fanciful thing had caught his attention. "We cannot understand anything in the world. It is all mysterious. So we must just have faith in it, and make as much sense as we know how."

"This sounds like a terrible proposition."

"Yes; I suppose it is. But then, I like things that are terrible, and ghastly, and awful. I welcome them. And I am a ghost now, after all. I am meant to be terrible. Or no. Terrifying." He made a face. "Ooooooh, I am a ghost! I shall haunt you! Ooooooh! --You see, you do not take me seriously."

The ghost was laughing. He had a quiet laugh, he had discovered. "I do," he said. "Most seriously."

Prouvaire looked at him with his sleepy gray eyes. The night was gathering. In its shadows, he looked younger and wiser. He smelled like wormwood, and the embers of a fire. He said, "I like to hear you laughing."

The ghost felt constrained. He lost his voice for a moment. At last: "You taught me how," he said. 

"No. It is a thing that comes from within you." Prouvaire leaned forwards, until their faces were almost touching. "I am glad," he said.

The ghost swallowed. "Glad of what?"

"Glad that I died. That everything happened just as it did." He brushed his lips against the ghost's: a contact too light to be called a kiss. He tasted of smoke, of liquor, of flowers; of warm lit rooms and wilderness. 

Then he was gone, a wisp in the dark. The bottle clattered down where he had been.

* * *

 

In the following days, Prouvaire did not appear. Pas de Nom, the ghost thought, grew lonely. Then he condemned this as a Prouvaire-like thought. Snails had not the capacity to be lonely. Still, something in its aspect suggested distress. The ghost watched it lower its small antennae and mournfully nudge at a torn cabbage leaf.

"You are an absurd creature," he told it.

But it was not so absurd. Everything loved Prouvaire. The sun seemed to lean towards him. Even in death, he was adored by comrades. Snails obeyed his every whim. It was clear that he was that cosseted creature who, gifted with every natural advantage, is excepted from rules and rewarded for nothing. 

"Just because he is pretty!" the ghost said in anger. "Because he is charming. He inveigles his way in."

Pas de Nom did not affirm or deny this statement.

"He is the reason we have laws. We, I mean the nation. We should legislate specifically against him."

He realized the foolishness of this statement. He felt that Prouvaire had driven him to it. He kicked in frustration at a pile of dust. His ghostly foot scattered it, and a market-woman at the end of the street shrieked. 

Pas de Nom paused in its chewing and directed a reproachful antenna at him.

"You have no name," the ghost told it, "and therefore your opinion is worthless."

The snail seemed wholly uncowed by this.

* * *

 

The children came by, and picked violets from the window-boxes, and then ran away again: screaming with laughter, their bare feet flying. Nickering horses came and went. The ghost thought often about the horse that had died. He was troubled by it. He thought often, also, about his own death. _I died_ , he thought to himself. _Somehow. Somewhere. I had a name. I made an end._ But he had exceeded the end of himself. What now was his limit?

For a time he skulked morosely inside a brick wall. He watched Pas de Nom feast upon some spinach leaves. They had fallen off a greengrocer's cart, and been trod into the cobbles till they were thin.

"You have no palate," the ghost said. "No urges, no desires, no taste for the fine things."

It seemed an admirable life. He envied it.

* * *

 

When at last Prouvaire appeared, it was meekly. He seemed very hesitant. He stood at the corner, holding a bunch of flowers that were tied up with a ribbon. Red flowers. Roses, or something of the sort, the ghost supposed. He was not sure he would recognize a rose. It was a thing that had not featured in his existence.

He considered ignoring Prouvaire for a while. Grudgingly, however, instead, he said, "I don't know why _you_ would come around here."

"Do you not?" Prouvaire fidgeted with the flowers. "I could go away again."

"Do as you like. You will anyways."

"Oh. I see. You are cross with me."

"I am not; I scarcely think about you."

"That is highly insulting. Most people think often of me. I am a very memorable person." Prouvaire paused. "Or I was."

There was a certain melancholy to him. It was harder to believe, when he was here in person, that he was merely charming. He had died, and that has a certain effect; and even before that, the ghost thought wearily, he had almost certainly been an extraordinary man. As he, the ghost, was not, or could not say he was, for he was formless: without certainty.

"Why are you here?" the ghost asked him straight-out.

"Well, we are having a Spiritual Billiards tournament, and now that Combeferre is gone, we are in need of another man, and Pas de Nom is a champion snail, and also, additionally, I thought that you might like the flowers." He held them out. "I do not wish to demean your street, but it is often dark, and you have only the violets. And perhaps Pas de Nom will enjoy the leaves."

"He is a snail," the ghost said. "He has no power of discernment."

"You say that, and yet--"

"Why _me?_ " He was not sure that he had meant to ask the question. "The city of Paris is full of ghosts. I haven't even a name; there is nothing left of me."

Prouvaire blinked. "I don't know why you should say that. You are a ghost of many qualities. You have a very bad temper; you care for your snail; you are stubborn; you are lonely. You laugh like someone just learning to laugh, who has not yet worn out the mechanism of it, who is still unsure of the gears and strings. I find that quite endearing. Also, I should add that you are a little in love with me, which is a characteristic I encourage in friends." 

"I am not in love with you." 

"Do not worry. I reciprocate the feeling. I find it very easy to love, you see."

"But--" the ghost floundered. "I am scarcely a person!"

"Just because you don't know who you were? I can't see why you should be bound to that former person. This is a new world, and we are newly born in it." He raised his hand and touched the ghost's cheek softly. "Take the chance you have been given. You are washed clean."

The ghost closed his eyes. He could imagine the touch as water-- not a torrent, but an anointment. _You are sinless; you are welcome among us. We have brought you to the place where you may drink._ He let himself turn his cheek against Prouvaire's palm. Just for a moment, he wanted to weep; but then he thought, what cause do you have for weeping?

He took the flowers. "Thank you," he said. "I would like to come with you, I think."

"Excellent!" Prouvaire beamed. He twined their fingers together, happy as a child. "You have your snail, correct? Oh, he is going to be a snail triumphant, an imperator snail. Such victory! Bahorel will rend his garments, which we will all enjoy. There are so many people for you to meet!"

He lead the ghost around the corner, and they entered on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, where the late sun was turning the cobbles to gemstones and weaving lace among the eaves. It seemed to the ghost for a moment, dazzled, that there was no end to the street-- that it stretched on forever, a river of light, growing wider and wider as it spilled towards the sea-- and then he blinked, and he saw that it was only Paris. He stepped towards it joyfully.

**Author's Note:**

> The Javert/Prouvaire challenge came from a very flattering anon on my Tumblr, though I doubt they expected this.
> 
> I have probably fudged the geography in this a little, though maps were consulted.
> 
> The notion of ghosts burning alcohol in order to get drunk comes from the excellent [needsmoreresearch](http://needsmoreresearch.tumblr.com) and her unutterably fabulous [Ghost Leech fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1167318/chapters/2374246).
> 
> "Limaçon" is a slightly archaic word for snail, now used mostly for the spiral of the shell.
> 
> I think that parts of this were strangely influenced by Resonant's quintessential Harry Potter fic ["The Familiar"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/98433?view_adult=true), and though I haven't read it in years, I would feel odd about not acknowledging it.


End file.
